Documenting Instanity: 4/23/06

Ray Ramirez, thank you for your honesty

And your service. Mr. Ramirez, a Vietnam Vet, wants the high school students who hung the US flag upside down under the Mexican ones to be expelled. He also wants the district to sanction the administrators who stood by, did nothing to stop it, then slapped the kiddies on the wrist. (HT: SondraK)

Amen! From his lips to God's ears.

Dry Bones on Iran

This is the funniest and most cynical cartoon of the week, by far. Go see.

You must be joking

Iran was just put on the UN Disarmament Commission. And their first act was to denouce the fact that Isreal is also on the Commission. The world is upside down. When are we gonna kick that whole corrupt organization off of our prime NY real estate and build something useful, like office buildings and condos?

Duke Rape non-case

La Shawn Barber has the rundown. It is really looking more and more like we are gonna see some defamation suits out of this one. The sharks are circling and they are not from the DAs office. Those lawyers are in the middle of the private sharks trying to figure out how to get out of the circle.

I feel some sympathy for Nifong. He was a white guy in a very black district that had a black woman come to him claiming to be raped by white guys a month before an election. He was in a very tough spot. If he didn't make this very public and it turned out the charges were valid and provable, he could have been in big trouble at the polls. He made the opposite mistake of making extremely public a very, very bad case and now may face disbarment charges if things keep going the way they have recently.

Is there a history of elected DA's getting disbarred? I would think that would be pretty rare.

Hot Talk on the Pulitzers

Melanie Morgan hits the nail on the head in "Mary McCarthy's leftist ties", an article on the cabal between lefties in the CIA and the abhorant behaviour of the antique media. Conservative women aren't just more attractive, better wives, mothers and lovers, they are smarter than their lefty counterparts too. Just my $0.02. Go read the whole thing.

We love Ann

Ann Coulter is a brash pundit but she does her homework. This week's column is the list of all the reasons why we are really having $3 gas and who voted for those poor policies. In her typical flambouyant and funny style she brings home the point that Republicans have not gotten around to pointing out to the short term memory public. It begins:

I would be more interested in what the Democrats had to say about high gas prices if these were not the same people who refused to let us drill for oil in Alaska, imposed massive restrictions on building new refineries, and who shut down the development of nuclear power in this country decades ago.

Go read the whole thing. Then send a pointer to 10 people you know who are pissed off about prices at the pumps.

Susan Estrich on Dem Strategy

As much as I can't stand Susan Estrich's voice and most of her positions she is one of the few public figures on the Lefty side who has figured out that "the base" can't get you elected on a national scale.

The only problem, of course, which they don’t want to hear, is that Hugh is right about them. If you only needed 40 percent to win elections, it might be fine. But elections require 51 percent, and you can take all the stands you want in favor of hatred, but it doesn’t get you to that magic number.

The people in the middle, the people whose votes take you from the hard core liberal Democrats to a governing majority in this country, are increasingly concerned about the direction this country is going in, but they don’t question George Bush’s motives. They don’t think he lied to them intentionally, and they don’t have much use for people screaming about the fact that he did.

I think her 40 is high. I don't think either extreme base is any higher than 30%. The country is much more centrist than it was years ago and the extremes in the bases (particularly the left base) are more extreme than ever. I don't think there is 1 in 3 Americans who nod in total agreement with Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean. Nor do I think there are 1 in 3 Americans who nod in total agreement with Tom Tancredo or Pat Robertson. The biggest appeal of the Republicans to the center is that you have to go outside the leadership of the party to find extremists. The leadership of the Democratic party are THE EXTREMISTS.

The Republicans, whether you agree with them or not, have put adults in the leadership of their party, and don't invite whacko extremists to the State of the Union address to sit in the Presidential box. If the choice in November is a party I agree with on most things who are putting spoiled kiddies up for national election and a party I disagree with on most things who are putting up somber adults who take the world's problems seriously......

There is a conspiracy!

To keep me from my morning news.

Both Powerline and Hugh are offline and have been for hours.

Same hosting company?

Denial of Service Attack by Kos Kidz? (Nah, they probably aren't bright enough, the CIA maybe?)

Hopefully, whatever it is it will resolve itself soon.

Update: Apparently there is a DoS going on with Hosting Matters, which hosts both Powerline and CQ (and I am presuming Hugh). LGF posted a handy dandy pointer to the discussion going on with Hosting Matters customers explaining things:

It doesn't really happen more often here than anywhere else, all things considered. I recall one NOC where they had a DOS of the week going on for close to six months. The target of this attack is not a high profile site, is not very well known outside of their own little circle, and otherwise is unremarkable. However, they've managed to irritate someone badly enough to have their site hacked twice and now they've generate this. So, as with anything that negatively affects every other client, we make adjustments. In this case, it means sending them out of the network so as not to impact anyone else.

Regarding the initial question: neither our own authorities (based on our experience with investigations of DOS attacks and other types of attacks) nor those in the country of origination are going to care about this enough to do anything about it. It's a sad fact of life.
__________________
Annette
Hosting Matters, Inc.
Superior service. Sensible price.

So apparently some minor customer of theirs has managed to royally piss off some foreigners. My experience with large ISPs is that there are many governments around the world who refuse to do anything about this sort of nonsense. And before you go jumping to conclusions, they are not all Islamocrazies or Commies. We are talking about Western European nations as well. Sad. Hopefully they will get a handle on it soon.

Update 2: Powerline and Hugh are back up. John claims the source of the DoS was Saudi Arabia. You can bet there will be no crackdown on the guilty party. Sad. Thanks to the folks at Hosting Matters for getting us our news back, I was forced to read the NYT today :-) It still sucks.

California gone nuts

We are dog people. We spoil our dogs as much as any sane person. But do the people of Santa Clara really need their supervisors adding "guardian" to "pet owner" in their county ordinances? In what strange alternate reality does any rational person think this will change people's behaviors?

And, in another example of California going to the dogs, check out this article on a fight over a group of senior citizens to continue using their clubhouse once a week for a Bible study. I hope to one day have this kind of free time on my hands.

Vox Day on the future of education

I often disagree with Vox Day, but he almost always lays out an argument for his position that you can follow. He does so on what he sees as the future of college education in this commentary, which I largely agree with. I particularly like the last paragraph:

Technology has an uncanny way of puncturing such structural vacuities. Already universities are flirting with various forms of Internet-based distance education, and once a brand-name university realizes that it is far more profitable to charge $1,000 per class to 10,000 online students than $40,000 in annual tuition to 1,000 on-campus freshmen without harming the brand, the next great revolution in higher education will begin.

Video iPod U! I love it. I especially love it for those of us who might like to take some classes that have crazy work schedules making it impossible to take traditional classroom classes. And I think it is already beginning to happen, although not fast enough for my taste.

Eminent Domain abuse resolution

We should all do this, in all 50 states, and put an end to the foolishness.

Eliot Cohen on the disgruntled generals

Eliot Cohen is a pretty well respected commentators on things military. What he has to say about the retired generals who are asking for Rumsfeld to step down in his Opinion Journal article is not kind, but well worth a read, especially for the generals in question themselves, IMHO.

Begin by noting that public denunciation will almost surely fail, because no president who thinks much of his role as commander in chief will throw the top Pentagon civilian overboard to please officers of any kind. If he did, he would establish the precedent that secretaries of defense serve at the pleasure of their subordinates, overturn the most fundamental feature of civilian control of the military, and neuter his own effectiveness in the conduct of national defense.

Even if ineffectual, however, these declarations do great harm. Retired generals never really leave the public service--that's why, after all, we still call them "general." They set examples for those junior to them in rank, and still on active duty. Imagine, for example, the disgruntled major in the Office of the Secretary of Defense deciding to subvert policy with which he disagrees by, say, leaking confidential memoranda to the press. "Not the same thing," one might respond, but remember that angry majors do not, for the most part, make discriminating moral philosophers. The retired generals have, in effect and perhaps unwittingly, made a case for disloyalty. Indeed, their most troubling belief is that an officer's civilian superiors--and the secretary of defense stands in the chain of command just below the president--do not merit the loyalty that they, as military superiors, would deserve and expect.

Go read the whole thing.

How much do you know about the US?

A quick and cute little test. I got a 25 out of 30, missing mostly amendments questions. Give it a try! (HT: Four Right Wing Wackos)

Paterrico continues on his LA Times hunt

In a very funny article on the comments on his post about Hiltzik's imaginary friends, Paterrico catches another member of the Times violating their code of ethics. Too much. (HT: LGF)

CIA Officer Fired

This story broke a few days ago. I have still seen no announcement of an indictment? I hope they get 2, one for the CIA lady, and one for Dana Priest.

Has anybody else noticed that there has been no further proof of the alleged CIA prisons that Dana single sourced for her Pulitzer (spit) Prize winning article? Is it possible that this entire thing was a plant of bad info to track down some of the CIA leakers? Is the CIA really that organized? I would like to think so but somehow doubt it.

Pictures from the past

SondraK has some old photos of "The Goddess (before SK) Sophia Loren". She continues to be both beautiful and classy. What happened to Hollywood? The rest of the cast of Grumpier Old Men were pretty cool too!

Band of Brothers

Scott has an excellent post at Powerline that includes a quote from a letter from US Corporal Walter Gordon to the Mayor of Eindhoven, one of the towns that E-Company bled for in WWII.

On September 17, 1944 I participated in the large airborne operation which was conducted to liberate your country. As a member of company E, 506th PIR [parachute infantry regiment], I landed near the small town of Son. The following day we moved south and liberated Eindhoven. While carrying out our assignment, we suffered casualties. That is war talk for bleeding. We occupied various defense positions for over two months. Like animals, we lived in holes, barns, and as best we could. The weather was cold and wet. In spite of the adverse conditions, we held the ground we had fought so hard to capture.

The citizens of Holland at that time did not share your aversion to bloodshed when the blood being shed was that of the German ocupiers of your city. How soon we forget. History has proven more than once that Holland could again be conquered if your neighbor, the Germans, are having a dull weekend and the golf links are crowded.

Please don't allow your country to be swallowed up by Liechtenstein or the Vatican as I don't plan to return. As of now, you are on your own.

Documenting Instanity

Saturday, April 29, 2006